asiana landing at san francisco a year and a half ago. and it s built on 747 technology and boeing builds pretty solid, pretty sound airplanes. air malaysia has 17 of them, of these 777 200 ers and they ve been operating them for a long time. so, the airplane has a superb safety record. it s a little difficult for me to believe it s a mechanical problem. looking to the past sometimes can give us clues to the future. let s talk about some of the other incidents that we ve seen and some of the theories that have risen out of them. let s look at tw 800, paris-pound flight exploded mid-air off the coast of long island 1996, serveral theories came about and all of them were disproven. that accident occurred
we are now on our way to beijing, as was the original flight plan. so, everything is set up in that particular way. one of the things we should talk about, carol, is the redundancy factor something the pilot here had mentioned. this aircraft, the 777 200 designed to go long distances and be out in the middle of no where. multiple backup systems and some suggested maybe they lost power and electricity to all of this. there are backups to that, right? there are a lot of backups. the electrical system, just that one system has six separate backup systems. the hydraulics is backed up eight times. the electrical system you have two generators on each of the engines, two engines. two back-up generators and then you have the apu, another generator in the back of the plane and if all of that failed, there is another manual little thing that pops out of propeller
caution. we have on the wall the dimensions of a 777 200, wingspan 200 feet long, the length about 200 feet long as well. when you talk of these potential pieces as seen many the satellite images, 43 by 59, 43 by 62, that could be any part of the plane or in fact these are busy water, it could be something else. and because the speed of the plane may have hit the water, hard to identify. it may not look like a piece of a plane from the air. that s the difficulty now. we re told by barbara starr who spoke with a senior pentagon official that the u.s., which of course has its own accurate and capable satellites now going to look back at its own satellite data in that same area to see if it can find any information to corroborate what these chinese government officials are saying. these are heavily traveled arias and ships just dump a lot of junk in those areas as well so let s have a little caution
two more passengers traveling on false documents. they re converging on this area in the gulf of thailand in the south china sea, the plane s last known location. on saturday the vietnamese military spotted two large fuel slicks on the water. now, it s not known if those are in any way connected to this missing 777, but it s all they have to go on at this moment so the search is concentrating in that area. three americans are among the 239 passengers and crew members including phillip wood, an ibm executive from texas. the plane, a boeing 777 200 series, nearly 12 years old, considered middle age for planes, in august of 2012 that very plane lost the tip of a wing after clipping another plane on the ground in shanghai. now, while that wing was repaired investigators will want to know whether that repair in any way contributed to the crash. clearly this is eerily similar to the air france flight 447 which disappeared over the atlantic in 2009 while search
consider rd oed one of the safe jets. in its 19-year history, its first crash happened last year. even the most experienced avi e aviators can t understand how this plane could simply disappear. the boeing 777 is one of the most high-tech planes in the sky. it s probably the nicest, most sophisticated but also one of the easier airplanes to fly. it s so sophisticated, it beams messages to the ground to identify maintenance problems before it even lands. there are systems to can t with the company and there are systems sometimes that monitor the health of the engines, automated reports. 777 200 extended range models are capable from flying from new